I'm the founding partner of Proteus International, and author of Growing Great Employees, Being Strategic, and Leading So People Will Follow. You can follow me on Twitter @erikaandersen. My websites are erikaandersen.com, and www.proteus-international.com. I'm insatiably curious. I love figuring out how people, situations and objects work, and how they could work better: faster, smarter, deeper, with greater satisfaction, more affection, and a higher fun quotient.

Why Top Talent Leaves: Top 10 Reasons Boiled Down to 1

Eric Jackson, a fellow Forbes blogger I follow and find both funny and astute, wrote a really spot-on post last month about why top talent leaves large corporations. He offered ten reasons, all of which I agreed with – and all of which I’ve seen played out again and again, over the course of 25 years of coaching and consulting. The post was wildly popular – over 1.5 million views at this writing.

So why do we find this topic so interesting? I suspect it’s because we’re genuinely curious: What would make a very senior executive – someone who most certainly has been courted by his or her organization and then paid huge sums of money to join – decide to pack it in? Is it greed (an even richer offer down the street)? Hubris? Short attention span? Or do 1%ers actually leave jobs for the same reasons as the average Joe or Josie?

According to Jackson (and, again, I agree with him) top talent does indeed leave for the same reasons everyone else does. If I were to distill his ‘top ten reasons’ down to one, it’s this:

Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.

About half of Eric’s ten reasons are about poor people management – either systemically, as in poor performance feedback, or individually, as in, my boss sucks. And the other half are about organizational lameness: shifting priorities, no vision, close-mindedness.

It really is that simple. Not easy, mind you, but remarkably simple. If you want to keep your best people:

1) Create an organization where those who manage others are hired for their ability to manage well, supported to get even better at managing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.

2) Then be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization – not only in terms of financial goals, but in a more three-dimensional way. What’s your purpose; what do you aspire to bring to the world? What kind of a culture do you want to create in order to do that? What will the organization look, feel and sound like if you’re embodying that mission and culture? How will you measure success? And then, once you’ve clarified your hoped-for future, consistently focus on keeping that vision top of mind and working together to achieve it.

I’ve worked with client organizations that do those two things, and people stay and thrive. I’ve worked with and observed client organizations that don’t – and it’s a revolving door. And that’s true at all levels – not just for “top talent.”

It’s fascinating to me: Why don’t more CEOs and their teams make sure these two things happen in their organizations? What do you think?

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I think you’re absolutely right – changing a culture requires not only focused effort over time, it demands that you begin with real clarity about the behaviors and beliefs you need to shift. And, perhaps most important, it requires consistent modeling of the new behaviors and beliefs by senior management, from the top down. Definitely not for the faint of heart!

Excellent article and discussion. I’d add two things. My answer to your last question in the article – is ‘ego’. Unfortunately I’ve watched this time and time again. At the end of the day, we’re all human. And when protection of a person’s ego is the prime driver for decisions, as opposed to the good of the organization, it cannot thrive in the long run.

Regarding courage and leadership, Professor Joe Leboeuf from The Fuqua School of Business at Duke said it best, “Courage is doing the right thing when no one is looking, and will never know”… I think we need more leaders with this type of courage.

I think there are other reasons as well: 1) Power trip – a prime example was stated by daburb: “If they don’t like the job, they can quit. There’s a line out the door for people that do want the job.” Translation – “I am the boss, so you have two options – either comply or get out of the way.” Of course it is shortsighted for many reasons, but many managers fear that by taking suggestions from direct reports and asking others for opinions, they are showing a vulnerability. 2) Incompetent competence – I am still astonished by how often people with fantastic technical competency get promoted into managerial roles without any consideration as to whether they have managerial competencies. By doing this, the company manages to mess up on two levels – a) they loose a wonderfully productive specialist AND b) they increase the turnover, decrease job satisfaction and jeopardize the performance of an entire team by putting a bad manager in charge.

I disagree that it’s difficult to change the culture. I worked at Ford of Europe and as a result of the Employee dissatisfaction surveys, the Chief engineer tasked the teams to work on suggestions from the own employees on how to make better the work environment. The suggestions were as simple as installing a microwave in a common kitchen area for people who wanted to eat healthy and brought their own food from home. Other issues were more complex and required either budget or more work.

When the midterm survey results showed little improvement in key areas, the Chief Engineer himself asked the actual managers to lead the weekly meetings (previously management assigned lower-ranked personnel to the tedious task thus things moved slower because of a lack of decision making). Things started improving afterwards as the commitments were made at the right level and changes enforced and reviewed periodically.

The decision making management should be involved in sponsoring the change, whether they like it or not.

daburb, My last (private sector) company suffers the same problem: defense contractor with 1 huge customer and 1 competitor…no incentive to change. Only the latest decline in business caused by withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan have instilled fear of profit reduction, but for me it was too little, too late. I wasted 8 years ‘idling’, which means falling behind.

Organizational culture has ‘inertia’, the longer it has been unchallenged, the more set-in-stone it is. One huge factor is longevity of personnel. The more ‘long-timers’, the less organizational flexibility. These folk are in their ‘comfort zone’, so they are not interested in change that will threaten their work world. Once a critical mass of ‘new blood’ enters the organization, there some hope for change.

Item #1 is tricky: Leaders often are driven by ego – they need to be in charge. How do you vet a candidate whose ego is destructive to the organization? Can a simulator reveal personality ‘style’? Unfortunately, Recruiters typically limit such testing to direct labor skills tests (e.g. typing test, technical math proficiency, etc.)

Item #2 is very real…the Peter Principle, promoting people to their level of incompetence. Organizations that have developed technical career tracks (promoting to different levels of technical recognition) avoids some of this problem. The other side of the issue is employee guidance for career directions…is this person fully aware of what the job promotion requires?